![]() ![]() ![]() The most interesting of these is Strawberry, an American living alone in a shack in the woods, getting back to nature and slowly killing herself with the strict “healing” diet she has put herself on.Īgainst these, Lott sets up a fearsome opposition in the guise of Lexham, the local small town, which is “marinated in ancient monotony”, and in particular its intolerant vicar, Wesley Toshack, with whose daughter Adam is immediately smitten. Here we are introduced to Henry’s circle of friends, a somewhat unconvincing cluster of typical 70s types, a bunch of lost souls all pretending to have found the way – political activism, radical feminism, dope – clustering round a guru whose influence is waning. But those heady days are now gone, any genuine spirituality subsumed by the kind of pure materialism of the aura-readers and crystal-peddlers at the local mind, body and spirit fair. He knows the Maharishi, has dealt drugs to the Beatles, been a priest, a criminal, a scholar, a guru. Henry counsels against guilt and believes that the present moment is the only reality. Adam reads Marvel comics, sunbathes, nurses his apathy and watches the water striders, the “Jesus bugs” that walk on water. Henry writes his book on “everything” and smokes. The first few days on the Ho Koji, on a backwater near a small village in the West Country, are peaceful. As father and son withdraw into their separate emotional shells, things fall apart, Ray is unable to cope, and Adam is sent to stay for the summer with Henry on his riverboat. When he quotes poetry Adam’s parents are uneasy, “as if culture itself were another dangerous narcotic that would get you into trouble sooner or later”.īut Henry is soon gone and boredom returns, only to be horribly shattered 10 months later when Adam’s mother chokes to death in front of him, dying, he believes, because of his own indecisive actions. Long considered by the rest of the family to be a reprobate and idiot, he turns out to be a well-groomed, urbane old hippy with a gentle humour and undertones of gravitas. Henry, as determinedly interesting as his brother is determinedly ordinary, is “out of touch with what Ray likes to think of as reality”. The monotony is disturbed by a visit from Ray’s brother, Henry, who arrives “one monochrome afternoon, on a late-winter day stillborn by a sterile, uncommitted sun”. Outside is a world of platform boots, patchouli and zen inside, Terry and June is on the TV, and all is tedium and beigeness.Īdam’s father, Ray, works in a shoe shop Evie, his mother, is little more than a kindly hovering presence. S et over one long hot summer of the 1970s, The Last Summer of the Water Strider is the coming-of-age story of Adam, a bored 17-year-old living with his mum and dad in a London council flat. ![]()
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